Scientist disputes account of killing along Palisades in Englewood Cliffs

Jim Miekka has never been to the Palisades, and if he went, he wouldn’t be able to see the cliffs rising above the Hudson River — he’s blind.

But the Florida-based scientist, inventor and stock market guru has spent months figuring variables for every way a person could fall from their heights, including being swung by the ankles, given a heave-ho by two people or pouncing from the precipice in a movement he termed a “leapfrog.”

Miekka — who has a long history of solving obscure problems with a mixture of obsessive focus and quirky logic — says his calculations could exonerate Stephen Scharf, a man serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2011 for throwing his wife from the edge of the Palisades in Englewood Cliffs. He says the findings also raise questions about how effectively science is applied in the courtroom.

The family of Jody Ann Scharf and law enforcement officials who investigated the case say, however, that Miekka’s project is an example of ill-placed advocacy that denies closure to victims of violent crimes.

“Every time something like this comes about, you live the entire experience all over again,” said Jody Scharf’s brother, John McAuliffe, a retired corrections officer who by coincidence is a leading expert on the death penalty in California. “As long as Stephen Scharf is still alive, there is no closure.”

In either case, it is clear that Jody’s death — which, according to her husband, happened without a sound — left behind a series of conflicting accounts that continue to reverberate decades later.Even after the case has been vetted by almost every possible arbiter, including law enforcement officials, family members, a jury and the media, Scharf has continued to insist he is innocent. In Miekka, he has an unlikely ally, a man who has no other connection to the alleged crime other than an almost religious conviction that science will reveal the truth.

Jody Scharf’s death, in 1992, was recorded as an accident for 16 years until law enforcement officials reopened the case, rankled by the same detail that attracted Miekka’s attention during a true-life crime documentary about it on the television news show “Dateline” in 2011.

Stephen Scharf has always maintained that the couple, on the verge of divorce, had been resolving their differences on the cliff edge when Jody slipped and disappeared.

But Jody Scharf’s body was found by a tree that was more than 50 feet from the cliff face — so far away, according to experts who examined the case for either side during the monthlong trial in 2011, that there was no way she could have fallen straight down, the most obvious trajectory if her husband’s account were true.

So much time had passed from Jody Scharf’s death until the trial that much of the evidence was lost, or was never properly collected. There were no eyewitness interviews. No blood samples. No photographs of Jody’s body at the scene. In their absence, prominent forensic scientists testifying for both sides pointed to the anomaly of her landing place as proof, but for competing explanations. On the one side, it meant that she was clearly pushed. On the other, that she hit a rock on her way down, altering her trajectory after she slipped.

But the circumstantial evidence weighed heavily against Stephen Scharf.

He admitted a string of affairs, including one with a woman who testified that shortly before Jody Scharf’s death, he told her he was about to resolve a source of stress in his life. Jody Scharf’s friends testified that she was afraid her husband would kill her.

Her therapist said Jody Scharf had mentioned that her husband had a “crazy” idea to have a picnic on the cliff edge, and she would never go.

The couple’s grown son, Jonathan, testified against his father, describing him as abusive and saying his father broke the news of his mother’s death with “a fake cry.”

And then there was a $730,000 life insurance policy Stephen Scharf took out shortly before his wife’s death, which he waited more than a decade to cash out.

Miekka — along with his chemical engineer father and a friend who is a mathematician for a company that makes vacuum chambers — said, however, that all those details were simply distractions from the truth that could be told only by the numbers.

No one standing on top of the cliff could throw a body far enough for it to land where Jody did, Miekka said.

“You could prove to a certainty higher than DNA that this guy couldn’t have possibly done that,” Miekka said.

Miekka’s only experience with the judicial system consists of a 2003 appearance on the Judge Judy show after he sued a matchmaking service for falsely claiming that it could find him regular dates for the rest of his life. He won.

But he has a long history of solving obscure problems. He is considered the progenitor of a formula, called the Hindenburg Omen, widely believed capable of predicting stock market crashes. And after he was blinded in a botched surgery — following an explosion involving a compound he was trying to patent for the mining industry — he invented a device that converts images to sound to allow blind marksmen to shoot with better accuracy than those who can see.

He said the Scharf case is another example of the type of vision that comes only through science.

“This is a case that supposedly took them 20 years to solve, and they still haven’t figured it out,” Miekka said. “But if you look at it from physics, it’s really straightforward. From a physics standpoint, there’s only one thing that could have happened.”

Miekka’s calculation relied on a principle he had taught high school students hundreds of times, he said, one he learned as a graduate student by shooting arrows at a block: All objects fall at the same rate.

Miekka contacted an engineer who testified as an expert witness on Stephen Scharf’s behalf for the numbers he needed to plug into his formula: including the 120-foot height of the cliff, and both Jody and Stephen Scharf’s heights and weights. And then he spent months with his friend and neighbor, Warwick Zeamer, calculating the possible scenarios that could have resulted in Jody’s death.

The pair say their findings show only two possibilities, only one of which makes intuitive sense. While there is a 10 percent chance she squatted and pushed herself off — the so-called leapfrog — she would have had to be able to leg press 494 pounds to propel herself out far enough, something only about 13 percent of women in the world could do. But Miekka and Zeamer are convinced she took a running jump, which would have required her to work up a 13 mph speed, starting from a cable fence 20 feet from the ledge, according to his calculations.

“This is an example where a purely qualitative, common sense judgment really falls short of being able to access reality,” Zeamer said. “We are certain that Stephen Scharf did not do what he is convicted of doing.”

They have sent the resulting report to several non-profit organizations devoted to freeing the wrongfully convicted, making them among Stephen Scharf’s only advocates. His lawyer, whom he never paid, cut off contact, and his son and sister denounced him and pleaded with the judge for the harshest possible sentence.

But they are not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Jim Kellinger, an LSAT tutor who spends much of his free time watching criminal trials out of what he described as a sense of civic duty, did similar calculations as he sat in the courtroom during the Scharf trial — he was so moved by the numbers that he requested the original reports from the accident investigation and other documents from the Prosecutor’s Office, he said. His requests were denied.

“Surrounding the simple physical evidence was every other human emotion: Greed, jealousy, revenge,” he said. “But in my view, the simple physical measurements of the fall are completely dispositive of the question of guilt, because he couldn’t have thrown her that far.”

Jurors who commented after convicting Stephen Scharf in Superior Court in Hackensack also said they had their doubts but were ultimately swayed because they saw no other explanation for why he would have taken his wife to the cliff in the dark. The panel took three days to come to a consensus, after originally breaking down 8-4 in favor of conviction, but the two alternates told a reporter they would have gone the other way.

Estimates of the wrongful conviction rate in the United States range from 1 to 5 percent, according to the Last Resort Exoneration Project at Seton Hall Law School. In New Jersey, where there is no death penalty, that computes to anywhere from 50 to 300 people who are wrongfully serving sentences of 15 years to life without parole. But most exonerations are due to DNA evidence — including five out of the eight exonerations in New Jersey the past 15 years.

Roger Koppl, the former director of the Forensic Science Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University — now on the faculty at Syracuse University — said the proliferation of crime scene investigations in popular culture has created a false impression that science can solve every legal problem.

He said Miekka’s report, which he reviewed, contained a lot of assumptions — including that Jody Scharf didn’t hit a rock on her way down and that she was fit enough to work up the speed required by their calculation. The analysis is also unorthodox, he said. Variables for how far she could leap and how much force Stephen Scharf could exert were imputed using world records for long jump and bench pressing. Nevertheless, he said, the fundamental assumption is sound.

“His underlying point that it’s not so easy to pitch someone over the edge of a cliff and have them land far away as opposed to close to the precipice, that’s true,” he said.

Stephen Scharf, who agreed to an interview at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where he is serving his life sentence, said he is grateful for the unsolicited help, which he plans to use in an appeal. But he still sticks by his story — that he was walking toward the car to get a blanket but turned around in time to see his wife slip as she tried to follow him. She had been drinking, he said, and she was wearing her favorite pair of sandals, with no traction.

“It’s like when you slip and you take a step forward to regain your balance,” he said, standing up to demonstrate the movement. “She didn’t stop. She kept stumbling forward.”

Stephen Scharf has gained weight since his trial, his eyes have sunk and his hair, once trimmed with military precision, hangs in white strands to his shoulders. And he spoke with bitterness about his son’s testimony, which he said was driven by greed and obsession with his self-image.

Through his uncle, McAuliffe, Jonathan Scharf declined to speak about the subject.

John Molinelli, the Bergen County prosecutor whose decision to reopen the case led to Stephen Scharf’s conviction, said that as far as he is concerned, the case is closed.

“I’m satisfied that the jury had ample qualified evidence to reach their determination,” he said. “And I rely on that as the best evidence that Mr. Scharf did — and I believe he did — kill his wife back in 1992.”